Change User Password with Ansible’s User Module

Mastering User Account Management in Linux with Ansible’s Powerful Automation

Introduction

In today’s episode of Ansible Pilot, I’m Luca Berton, and we’ll be delving into the process of changing a user password on a Linux system using Ansible. Specifically, we’ll be utilizing the ansible.builtin.user module, an integral part of Ansible's collection of built-in modules.

The Ansible User Module

The ansible.builtin.user module is a stable and well-established component of Ansible, designed to manage user accounts. It boasts compatibility with a wide range of Linux distributions, including RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, as well as SunOS, macOS, and FreeBSD. For Windows systems, the equivalent module is ansible.windows.win_user.

Parameters

The user module comes with various parameters, but the three key ones for our password-changing task are:

• name (string): Specifies the username.
• state (string): Indicates the desired state of the user account (present or absent).